'Catfish' asks what you can believe, online and on screen

Like Facebook, this movie makes you wonder what is real

A young man develops a romantic relationship on Facebook, only to find he doesn't know what to believe.

This relationship is played out in a documentary that leaves some viewers not knowing what to believe.

This documentary is being sold via a misdirecting marketing campaign that boasts the slogan, "Don't let anyone tell you what it is."

No wonder so many people are confused.

"Catfish," the just-released Facebook-related documentary, bears no direct relation to "The Social Network," David Fincher's feature about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that opens Friday. But it's fitting that both movies are coming out now — and that they're on the heels of Casey Affleck's "I'm Still Here," yet another film that provokes questions about self-presentation and what can be trusted.

With so many people living so much of their lives in the digital world, our collective sense of reality is being challenged. Even the word "reality" has become loaded, with so-called reality series commonly assumed to involve more fakery than fidelity to unscripted life.

Rogue Pictures is pushing "Catfish" as a "reality thriller."

The filmmakers insist what's in the movie is real.

"Obviously, (documentaries) are edited and composed," co-director Ariel Schulman, 28, said as he, co-director Henry Joost, 27, and the film's primary subject, Nev Schulman (Ariel's brother, 25), lunched in a downtown restaurant last week. "This film, however, nothing is reconstructed. It is 100 percent as it was, and it's completely true."

"We've edited it in a way that we feel is closest to the actual experience and evokes the emotions that are closest to the emotions that we had while we were making it," Joost said. You can't release a 200-hour documentary."

Any presentation involves making choices and requires some semblance of trust from its intended audience. No film can literally capture actual events. No newspaper story, for that matter, can literally capture an interview. And no Facebook page offers an unobstructed window into the life of its author.

So, when Nev Schulman, sort of an easy-smiling, swarthier Jason Schwartzman-type, struck up a Facebook relationship with family members of an 8-year-old girl who had sent him a painting based on a newspaper photo he'd shot, he had reason to believe all was on the up and up. If that were true, there wouldn't be a movie.

The story's twists made the low-budget "Catfish" a hot buzz topic at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and Rogue bought its rights shortly afterward. The movie has since undergone a few trims — mostly deletions of profanity, the filmmakers said — to get the MPAA rating down to a PG-13, yet how it's perceived may have shifted for different reasons.

"I think the reaction has definitely changed since Sundance, which is interesting also because we see now the marketing release of the film starting to color people's reactions," Joost said, "At Sundance, it felt a lot more like a discovery and a little film, and now it's got this big company behind it and this strange trailer."

The trailer sets up the online romance between Nev and a young woman named Megan and his trip, with the two directors in tow, to rural Michigan to visit her. Their car is last shown pulling into a dark driveway; the impression is that the movie turns into a "Blair Witch Project"-type horror show.

Toward the end of Sundance, Movieline writer Kyle Buchanan posited that the Schulman brothers and Joost knew more than they let on before they set out to film what becomes the movie's last act, thus creating what he felt was a situation more exploitative than revelatory.

Their version is straightforward: The Schulman brothers routinely shoot video of each other, and Ariel Schulman and Joost are filmmaking partners who have worked largely on ads and shorts, so it was natural that they would turn the cameras on Nev when he began corresponding with the painter girl, Abby. They said they didn't realize they were making a feature until they discovered the online oddities that broadened the story.

Still, the presence of cameras and desire to make a film do have a way of altering reality. Nev said the filming in part spurred the decision to travel to Michigan. Did they hold back on seeking out the answers ahead of time because they knew the drama would play out better on camera?

"There were a lot of things along the way that I wondered about," Nev said. "There always seemed to be an explanation or a reason to move on and not think about anything too long."

"Catfish" has been enthusiastically received, with the Rotten Tomatoes Web site tabulating 79 percent positive notices. In one of the more conflicted reviews, the New York Times' A.O. Scott called the movie "undeniably exploitative" and, on some levels, "a wretched documentary" yet also "by far, one of the most intriguing movies of the year."

Ariel said the exploitation charge "stung" because they thought they'd been nice to the person who's supposedly exploited — hence the last act's heightened emotions — and he argued that what Scott found fascinating was a direct result of how they presented the story. "He wouldn't have gotten that impression if we hadn't made the movie."

There's no doubt the filmmakers have tapped into something larger than their tale, namely a world in which people seek connection through isolation as they craft their own virtual identities.

"In order to be more popular," Nev Schulman said, "you need to spend more time online."

And now, the Schulmans and Joost said they're on Facebook more than ever.